The Quizbowl Resource Center

Magister Ludi

If the only real argument against adjusting the schedule is the fact you "want" to play all the rounds then that strikes me as disappointingly selfish. This is a stupid conversation. No this is a crucial conversation because we haven't gotten a definite answer yet. I'm asking the history ...

Magister Ludi

The history tournament still only has 9-10 packets and is only likely to get 3-4 more. Ted, are you amenable to what I suggested earlier--i.e. after the history tournament, you/me/Jonathan go to a room with a reader and just play aside from the rest of the field? My goal is not to play some back-al...

Magister Ludi

It seems incredibly misguided to run the whole history tournament to prove some philosophical point The reason I want to run the whole history tournament is because it is a tournament that I want to play, not to prove any further point. "Hey everyone else just run half a tournament so I can le...

Magister Ludi

Conversely to Ted, I would not want to put in the substantial work of writing a whole packet and then find out that the history tournament is going to be abbreviated because of people reading "CO this year will have side events all day Sunday" and then mashing the "BOOK FLIGHT FOR 3 ...

Magister Ludi

To answer Ryan's question about whether playing 19 packets would really go until 4:30, I looked at last year's data. We started about an hour (maybe even more) late, so around 8 PM. We got kicked out at 11:15 PM or so after playing 10.5 rounds. This comes out to roughly 20 minute rounds. I think we...

Magister Ludi

I see where Ted is coming from with the "12 rounds of quality vs 19 rounds of Guerilla." That said, the formation of the current schedule now has about 3 months of deliberation attached to it - that of no Friday/Saturday night games ( Late April ), WELD being announced for Sunday post His...

Magister Ludi

I think we should try to work out some sort of a scheduling compromise, so both the lit and history tournaments can be successful. Right now the lengthy schedule of the history tournament (Since when are side tournaments nineteen packets long anyway?) is significantly fucking up WELD. I think we can...

Magister Ludi

Hey, if this is being played after history doubles, I won't be able to play since I need to make my flight, so I'm going to withdraw. Could we switch the times of the history and lit tournaments on Sunday? Considering that Will has devoted tons of hours to actually writing a whole tournament it onl...

Magister Ludi

It looks like I'm going to be in Virginia for August and September interning at a magazine, so I would also support hosting a mirror (or the main site) of Kurtis' tournament somewhere in the DC area. It makes more sense to me to host a mirror in the DC area where many people could play without trave...

Magister Ludi

I'm playing this with Chris Ray. Does this mean all the questions will be parody tossups on "elephants in literature" written by Ted? I will actually write this thing for VCU Open if Chris and Evan are interested, even if at this point it is just for fun, but elephants would be a disappoi...

Magister Ludi

I'm playing this with Chris Ray. Does this mean all the questions will be parody tossups on "elephants in literature" written by Ted? I will actually write this thing for VCU Open if Chris and Evan are interested, even if at this point it is just for fun, but elephants would be a disappoi...

Magister Ludi

Ukonvasara wrote:Gautam Kandlikar and I are playing this and are searching for teammates.

Are you looking for a fourth to round off the team?

Magister Ludi

I thought this was an absolutely first-rate set and I want to thank the editors for the obvious amount of work that went into producing it. Though, I have a few small suggestions for Jonathan to make next year's set even better. I agree that the set definitely had a "Magin-y" feel to it, w...

Magister Ludi

I think there are a few common fallacies that people fall into when ranking individual players in this poll, which people should be aware of: 1. Ignoring the regular season in rankings. One should remember that the poll is meant to determine who played the best over the entire year. If you ranked pl...

Magister Ludi

This will come across as self-serving, but I want to point out that people should not just ignore the regular season when making these rankings and rank players on teams based solely on their ppg at nationals. It appears to be the community consensus that Dallas outplayed me this year, but objective...

Magister Ludi

In an effort to improve the issues from last year's poll, I'm going to try to explain a few of the common fallacies I've seen affecting some voters in the past. But before going into that topic, I was wondering if the purpose of this thread was envisioned as discussing different methodologies for ev...

Magister Ludi

I agree with what you are saying, but found this very exhausting to read. As a person with some experience of pontificating on the boards, I would urge you away from making encyclopedic posts demanding people fix their writing because I found that people are more likely to focus on controversial (an...

Magister Ludi

I'm sure people will be mad about the seeding of ICT, but I think any problems were a result of a uniquely even field rather than anything NAQT did wrong. I know I was initially angry about Harvard's seeding as the third number two seed, and was specifically irked we were below Minnesota because we ...

Magister Ludi

So, this tossup actually decided the second game of the finals at our site. From what I know, someone negged early on, and at the end of the tossup one player (from Michigan) buzzed and said "treatise on government," was prompted by M. Sorice*, said "second treatise on government,&qu...

Magister Ludi

I wanted to bump this thread to say that by popular demand from Chris Ray and Eric Mukherjee we are having an after-party for this tournament. Everyone should come because it will surely be the social event of the quizbowl season.

Magister Ludi

Was part of this tournament's schtick to sprinkle in joke questions? The one packet I randomly clicked on had entire tossups that read: "15. FTP, say you made ten thousand dollars last year. Answer: "You made ten thousand dollars last year."

Magister Ludi

Good to know. If someone could post the date and time of this event, I'll be sure to tune in. Anyway, on the topic of metadiscussion: I'll throw my hat in with Bruce, who I think adequately characterizes the state of these debates. We've all been guilty of this at one point or another, so let's jus...

Magister Ludi

The explosion of vitriol in the BARGE discussion saw the culmination of several, separate issues in one tangled and unproductive thread. I didn’t articulate my objection well in the other thread and don’t think the criticisms leveled against me were necessarily unfounded. I’d like to apologize to th...

Magister Ludi

because our first game against UVA was particularly ripe with very early buzzer races that happened to end in negs that I didn't count for the purposes of this exercise. I might just be missing something obvious here, but does it really count as a first-line buzzerrace if the person isn't actually ...

Magister Ludi

Moderator note: Stop telling other people not to post things or judging post-hoc whether they are Top Posters who are allowed to post things. Poster note: This is a lot of nonsense over an attempt to defend the obviously ridiculous claim that the reason there was an alleged buzzer race is because o...

Magister Ludi

What Daniel Hothem is correct in pointing out that you need to look at all the games between top players to make any accurate determination about this issue. I initially didn't want to go through all my notes and list every buzzer race, but simply register my completely justified complaint about thi...

Magister Ludi

I actually considered that tossup on the Paris Opera House to be less-obvious than previous iterations, but I still found it pretty underwhelming and obviously it played at least as poorly as I expected it to. I think we need to give that answer a bit of a rest - if you looked at regular and beyond...

Magister Ludi

I also began overdosing on Chris Ray whimsy by the time the tournament ended. I'm certainly guilty of this myself, but it seemed like way too many bonuses prattled on, offering jokingly whimsical commentaries for multiple lines in addition to clues. While I don't mind a few of these, it got a bit t...

Magister Ludi

Please refer to Auroni Gupta's comments in the Minnesota Open thread to see your claim is false. Refer to them yourself. What a burn! Oh hush you incorrigible idiot. It's the height of hypocrisy to call someone out for idiotic one-liners after you did the same thing twice in the same thread. Also, ...

Magister Ludi

I was pointing out that people who support line length say there are never buzzer races on the first line and in fact this tournament was decided on such a question. I'll just point out, again, that said buzzer race was probably on a question of significant length given the rest of the questions in...

Magister Ludi

I was pointing out that people who support line length say there are never buzzer races on the first line and in fact this tournament was decided on such a question. I'll just point out, again, that said buzzer race was probably on a question of significant length given the rest of the questions in...

Magister Ludi

Also please don't imply I don't have respect for Jonathan who I view as the greatest literature player I've ever seen.

Magister Ludi

Look man, Jonathan Magin got a lit question. Therefore the tournament is illegitimate due to common links even though the question wasn't a common link, "line length Nazis" even though the question was 10 lines long, and The Wrong People getting questions even though Jonathan Magin has an...

Magister Ludi

Can you input the stats for the final two games of the rebracket?

Magister Ludi

Magin's team defeated Harvard plus Bruce in the de facto final 320-270. Overall, it was a pretty solid tournament, so thanks to Chris for editing the set and filling it with his singular sense of humor. Congrats to Daniel Hothem for winning his first tournament, even though the final was unfortunate...

Magister Ludi

I would associate myself with the view you're presenting in opposition to mine--I do think that it's a waste to toss up Pareto's alternative term for "utility" and other economics chestnuts over and over, but that's further motivation for me to write economics questions that are relevant ...

Magister Ludi

You're right. I don't take the view that comfortable ignorance is the ideal end state. If math questions are hard, learn more math, don't hurl petulant insults at people who know more than you and declare your ignorance is a source of strength. If that's how you feel, watch Fox. Your argument kind ...

Magister Ludi

Finally, even more importantly, I think that long questions prevent editors from buckling down and making sure the tossups are as clue-dense, efficient, and packed full of middle clues as possible. It's important to make a distinction here between excellent editors and mediocre editors (and all deg...

Magister Ludi

For those too lazy to read the above post, basically I think there are several valid reasons why an editor is justified to write longer tossups. We shouldn't be criticizing a tournament just because they've decided to write short tossups or long tossups, but rather criticize the tournament if the li...

Magister Ludi

Basically, I want to push back against two doctrines that some people want to put forward as universal truths: 1) Shorter tossups are inherently better than longer tossups therefore we should value 8 line tossups more than longer tossups and use them at all hard tournaments; 2) There are no valid re...

Magister Ludi

Buzzer races on first clues even between two great players at hard tournaments are so rare they are effectively negligible in this argument. To play devil's advocate for a second: One could argue, as Ted is doing, that this is true at least in part because hard tournaments in the past have generall...

Magister Ludi

I disagree with Ted; I think 7-8 lines is fine for easy answer lines at hard tournaments as long as you choose appropriate answer lines and clues. To my mind, Ted's argument goes astray by assuming that knowledge is mostly linear: Person A has 5 units of knowledge about Garcia Marquez, and Person B...

Magister Ludi

I'm on the other side of the line limit debate. I don't think we need 10 lines to differentiate who knows the most about Henry Green, but I think having more lines is correlated with having quality questions on easy topics in hard tournaments. You actually could use 10 lines to differentiate all lev...

Magister Ludi

Harvard would be interested in mirroring this.

Magister Ludi

I personally think it's a more productive editing strategy to pick hard parts based on what is important and likely to be known within a topic. For example, if I wrote that Naipaul bonus I would think to myself: What would make an important third part that someone who is knowledgeable about Naipaul...

Magister Ludi

Are you keeping these packet deadlines with the last deadline a whole month the tournament or would you consider pushing them back a week or so? It just seems like teams haven't even been fully formed for this event yet.

Magister Ludi

I partially agree with Chris; as I was reading through the packets, I thought that there were a significant number of bonuses that didn't have answerable third parts. On the other hand, I thought that Seth's team had a noticeable advantage on the bonuses, so I'm not sure that the muddy battlefield ...

Magister Ludi

Quick impressions: I thought this was a very good tournament. One of the things I want to commend the editing team for, which I usually bitch about, is the quality of the science (at least in my areas). Overall the quality of the science and the answer selection was very good, if also quite hard at...

Magister Ludi

Again, directly stating that other tournaments are not "meaningful" for top teams. But don't quote Ted Gioia in context saying what he actually said! That's the sort of unfair gotcha journalism that victimized people like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain in the past! As someone who respects HS...

Magister Ludi

I knew nothing when I was an ignorant freshman in high school playing the PACE NSC as my first tournament. According to Fred Morlan this should have been a horribly alienating experience that should have driven me from quizbowl forever, but it played out differently. The closest I came to saying an...

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